"I Didn't Think It Would Be This Hard," Says Move Designer

Waving your arm is simple, but making a controller that can follow that movement is super-tricky, says the designer behind the PlayStation Move.

To the casual observer, Sony's new motion controller Move is a glowing ball on a stick, with a few buttons thrown in for good measure. Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that, and in an interview with Famitsu, designer Yoshio Miyazaki said that he was surprised at how difficult it was to get Move actually working.

Miyazaki worked with Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida and said that Yoshida had commented that he had never been on a project that had gone through so many revisions. He said that a trifecta of hardware issues, software problems and budgetary concerns meant that Move's design was constantly changing and evolving.

Move's price tag proved to be tricky, as Sony was convinced that unless they could keep the bundle - controller, camera and software - under 10,000 yen, or approximately $125, then there wasn't a hope of it selling. Miyazaki said the manufacturing budget for Move was based on that number, and that his initial reaction was that the task was impossible. But with some retooling and a reduction in the number of components, Miyazaki said that his team was able to get Move's manufacturing costs within the limits that Sony had set.

Miyazaki also admitted that he underestimated the challenge involved in getting everything to work, saying that he had no idea that getting accurate data from the sensors would be so difficult. Actually getting the sensor to talk to the PS3 was easy, he said, but the data was affected by changes in temperature and other environmental conditions, and it took both hardware revisions and the assistance of the software developers in minimizing the variation.

Despite Move's release last month, Miyazaki doesn't consider Sony's work to be over. Move is a part of Sony's long-term strategy for the company, and Miyazaki hopes that people will check it out as more and more Move compatible games become available.